The Black Man in the Forest

The Scarlet Letter takes place on colonized land and was written in a slaveholding republic, and for most of its length it keeps its eyes elsewhere. Megan Marshall, a biographer of the nineteenth century, reads the book with both of those facts in view, tracking what Nathaniel Hawthorne notices about race and dignity, what he cannot, and what a careful reader finds in the spaces where the novel goes quiet. Her verdict runs in two directions at once: the Black Man of the forest is period devil-lore, not racial slander — and yet the novel, written in the decade of the Fugitive Slave Act, displaces its own era's racialized violence onto a single white minister's back.

Hawthorne calls the devil the Black Man, the figure who waits in the forest with a book for people to sign, and Hester tells Pearl she met him there. A modern reader flinches at the language, and Marshall takes the question of that language seriously rather than waving it away. Her conclusion, grounded in the period, is that the metaphor is not doing the racial work a contemporary ear assumes. "In this era, at least in the era of Hester, the Black Man signified this devil and did not adhere to any carryover of racism into the notion of the devil," she says. The category of race itself, Marshall notes, "was really kind of in its infancy." The terms had not yet hardened. People spoke of nations as having races, and Hawthorne in the Custom-House preface even calls his own family "the race of Hawthornes."

A Metaphor Used on Both Sides of the Color Line

Marshall does not just assert the acquittal; she went looking for evidence, and what she found complicates the easy reading in a striking way. Reading a newly recovered slave narrative by John Swanson Jacobs, the brother of Harriet Jacobs, Marshall noticed that Jacobs himself, a Black man reviled for his skin, reaches for the identical metaphor. "John Jacobs himself, a Black man who was reviled for his skin color, nevertheless uses the same metaphor," she says. "This is the blackest form of evil. Enslavement. He uses that word black to describe the evil of slavery." The metaphor of blackness as evil, in other words, did not belong to one side of the color line. It was, as Marshall puts it, pretty widespread, used even by the people racism most brutalized. She declines, on that basis, to convict Hawthorne of the imagery.

The Scourge Displaced onto a White Minister's Back

But Marshall is just as clear about what the novel does not do, and this is where her reading has the most edge. The book is set in the 1640s and written in 1850, the same decade the Fugitive Slave Act passed, and Hawthorne mostly looks away from the central horror of his own moment. The violence that pervades a slaveholding society gets displaced, in the novel, onto a single white minister's private chamber. Marshall reads the scene where Arthur Dimmesdale scourges himself, a bloody whip kept under lock and key, as exactly this displacement. "The issue of Hawthorne's day, which is not seemingly addressed directly here because we've gone two hundred years back," she says, the question of "who is being branded and who is being scourged — it's really the enslaved population who suffer in this way." Hawthorne takes the era's real, racialized brutality and relocates it to a guilty white man flagellating himself in secret. The scourge appears. The people actually being scourged do not.

The Dignity of the Wild

There are, however, people at the edge of the frame, and Marshall is attentive to them. The novel repeatedly references the Indians, the red men, associated with the woods and the wild. Marshall reads Hawthorne as granting them a real if limited dignity. "They are given dignity for the most part, and given the dignity of the wild, which is in the end a trait that Hester embodies and imbibes," she says. Hester is allied with the forest's wildness, and that alliance is part of her strength. But Marshall names the cost of that romanticism without flinching. "It may be an appropriation of Indianness, but it's not denigrating," she says, and then pushes further on what the exoticizing does over time. The novel participates, she argues, in "a kind of exoticizing of the Indian, and setting up a sense that they need to be elsewhere," the logic that keeps pushing the wild "farther and farther away until there's nothing left and no room for these people anymore."

What gives Marshall's reading its authority is that she has stood where Hawthorne stood. As a biographer of the Concord circle, she knows the documentary record of the Native people who were actually there. "When the Hawthornes were living at the Old Manse, the native peoples who were of Concord would still come and settle there for periods on the shore right near them," she says. Sophia Hawthorne walked among them with Henry David Thoreau as they made baskets to sell, a people reduced to that, and the Hawthornes mingled with what Marshall calls admiration. So Hawthorne does not erase Native people from his world the way many writers did. "Nathaniel's not leaving them out," Marshall says. The question she raises is what he does with them once they are in the frame, and her answer is honest about the limits: dignity, yes, but the dignity of the wild, which is also a way of consigning them to the vanishing woods.

The Question the Novel Leaves Open

Marshall lets Hawthorne pose the hardest version of the question himself, in a line she returns to as the possible center of the whole book. Is the real sin "the absorption of the Indian wildness into the white concept of self-reliance, while simultaneously sending the true natives of America into the forest and beyond"? She does not answer it, and neither does the novel. That, finally, is Marshall's reading of The Scarlet Letter on race: a book that sees more than its century usually managed, that grants real dignity at the margins, that displaces its own era's worst violence onto a safer target, and that leaves its sharpest question open. The settlers, in Hawthorne's view filtered through Marshall, are the ones botching everything. The woods are always there. So are the people in them. The book mostly keeps its eyes on the Puritan town. Marshall makes sure the reader also looks at the edges, where the novel both sees and refuses to see.